Dimitrios Ioannidis

Ruthless Greek dictator who toppled the junta for being too liberal and sought
union with Cyprus

Dimitrios Ioannidis , who died in custody on Monday aged 87, was the brutal head of military security during the Greek colonels’ dictatorship that lasted from 1967 to 1974. A key member of the original junta, in 1973 he turned against its leader, George Papadopoulos, ruling Greece from the shadows for eight months and provoking a subsequent coup in Cyprus that prompted the Turkish invasion and occupation of the northern part of that island.

Ioannidis, deputy head of Greece’s military academy when the initial colonels’ coup took place in Athens on April 21 1967, was named commander of the military police (ESA) and the organisation responsible for national security (OSA). Under his leadership ESA, the much-feared scourge of the regime’s opponents, became a virtually autonomous unit with its own transport, communications and equipment.

Ioannidis oversaw the creation of EAT/ESA, the special interrogation section of the military police, at whose headquarters opponents of the regime, both civilian and military, were systematically tortured. The building bore the motto: “He who enters here exits friend or cripple.”

After King Constantine’s unsuccessful counter-coup in December 1967, the majority of the 13-man Revolutionary Council resigned their military commissions to take key posts in a civilian administration with Papadopoulos as prime minister. Ioannidis refused to quit the army, however, and opinion was divided whether he was Papadopoulos’ eyes and ears in the armed forces, or an untouchable with his own revolutionary ambitions.

Papadopoulos, who referred to Ioannidis by the nickname Mimis, initially trusted him. But it gradually became apparent that the ESA chief was a purist who refused to see diluted the “revolution” he had helped instigate.

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In 1973, as Papadopoulos sought to introduce a guided democracy under a restrictive constitution (with new parties consisting of tame civilians and retired military men), Ioannidis became increasingly disruptive.

In September he was offered promotion to brigadier and transferred to head the 8th division in Ioannina, where his family had its origins. He refused and was placed on two months’ compulsory leave, during which time he continued nevertheless to turn up at his ESA office, openly declaring his opposition to the proposed new political system.

When the army was called in on November 17 to quell a student demonstration against the junta at the Athens Polytechnic – causing dozens of deaths and injuring hundreds, though the exact figure has never been established – Ioannidis moved to oust Papadopoulos. On November 25 troops loyal to him arrested Papadopoulos and installed a serving general, Phaidon Gizikis, as president.

A puppet administration was established and Adamantios Androutsopoulos, a Greek-American lawyer , was named as prime minister – though he had little influence, and there was no doubt that Ioannidis, now known as “the invisible dictator”, was really in charge.

The Ioannidis regime rounded up many political prisoners who had been amnestied by Papadopoulos – including former senior politicians – and exiled them to island prison camps. It did not reimpose censorship. Rather, newspapers that published articles which displeased Ioannidis simply found their premises padlocked. Rumours began to circulate of the renewed torture of detained political opponents.

Little was known of Ioannidis’s own politics. He commanded the loyalty of a group of middle-ranking officers who would have liked to see the regime take a more socialist bent. Ioannidis, however, managed to divert their ambitions to nationalise banks and major industries. Never taking political office, he instead issued orders from the wings and used an iron fist to ensure compliance. It was, as one commentator quipped surreptitiously, like “Beria trying to rule without Stalin”.

Dimitrios Ioannidis was born in Athens on March 13 1923 but grew up in the poor northern region of Greece which borders Albania. He entered the Greek military academy in 1940 but, following the German invasion of Greece, joined an anti-Nazi resistance movement. The Second World War bled into a civil conflict and, like several members of the junta, he fought in the Greek mountains against communists in the late 1940s.

It was the island of Cyprus in the 1970s that would be his undoing.

Union of Cyprus with Greece, or enosis, had been a key goal of the colonels’ coup. Officers attached to a Greek contingent (in place under the accords by which Cyprus had won independence from Britain in 1960) were suspected of manipulating a clandestine military force to agitate to that effect. But their plans were thwarted by the political manoeuvring of the Cypriot president, Archbishop Makarios, who publicly denounced the Greek officers on Cyprus as “conspirators against the state”.

This allegation seemed amply proven when, on July 15 1974, the Ioannidis regime sponsored a coup against Makarios . Turkey, professing concern for the ethnic-Turkish population on the island, invaded five days later, occupying about 20 per cent of the country .

This spectacular national disaster rebounded on Ioannidis, who was almost immediately sidelined by the military establishment in favour of an all-party political government under the veteran conservative politician Constantine Karamanlis, who returned to Greece from exile in Paris.

Talks between the new civilian government and Turkey to try to resolve the Cyprus crisis collapsed and Turkey launched a second assault on the island in August, this time seizing and occupying its northern third. Over the next year the country’s ethnic Greeks and Turks, who had lived intermingled, fled or were driven into two ethnically homogeneous regions, a situation that endures today.

In Greece it became the perceived wisdom that Ioannidis had done a deal with the CIA to allow the landing of 6,000 Turkish troops on Cyprus, who would have been allowed to create a small ethnic Turkish enclave in exchange for the rest of the island proceeding with enosis. Ioannidis claimed by this means to have been “fooled” by the Americans into not ordering formal Greek military resistance to the Turkish landing.

At his trial in 1975 he was sentenced to death, immediately commuted to life imprisonment, which he served in the high security wing of Korydallos prison, west of Athens. He continued to cultivate the role of ideologue and refused to express any regrets for his actions.

According to local press accounts he spent his allotted exercise time cultivating a garden in a small inner courtyard – a privilege lost when the jail was redesigned to accommodate convicted members of the November 17 extreme-Left terrorist movement (which took its name from the date of the crushed Athens Polytechnic uprising).

Known as an ascetic during his years in the military, Dimitrios Ioannidis reportedly married in 2003 the widow of a former military school classmate, who had visited him regularly. In 2005, as his health began to fail, he applied for parole. It was refused and he spent the last three months of his life under guard in Nikea Hospital.